Maybe Apple is just having some projectors custom built for the Apple stores. A little birdie told me they have not been happy with the installs at some locations....
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Apple Entering Projector Market?
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Just some thoughts:
Assuming that most people consider DVD to be sufficient quality, we should note that most DVDs never get close to exploiting the 8mb/sec theoretical maximum of the DVD-Video spec.
For the most part, most commercial titles appear to exploit around 50% of the bandwidth - i.e. 4mbits/sec - which equates to 500KB/sec.
Even with 1 megabit broadband, it's going to take 7 hours to download a movie - in other words, you'd have to decide before going to bed on Friday night what you wanted to watch on Saturday, and if you want a second movie - not unreasonble - you'd have to kick off that download just after breakfast.
So assuming that asking an audience to plan ahead rather than seek instant gratification is a viable model, you could - when megabit broadband is pervasive and cost-effective - launch an iMedia Store.
However, the key word is 'WHEN', which is not 'NOW' - so what would be the behind an Apple reinvention of the DLP projector.
This question needs a wider focus, namely would Apple consider a re-invention of the AV market - whether domestic or commercial - as a viable market and, if so, what might they set as design/functionality goals?
What if Apple chose its 20th anniversary to finally demonstrate how all of its technology works togther in a truly seamless way.
The glue to all of this is not Airport as some have said, but the rather more prosaic Firewire. 1394b (or what we call Firewire 800) has the ability to deliver the equivalent of around 20 typical DVD-quality streams (100 mbits) over standard CAT5 cabling to a distance of 100m. Using plastic optical fiber, you can send 40 streams to a distance of 50m without a repeater.
Firewire is the basis for other technologies such as the HAVi initiative, and is capable of acting as TCP/IP-capable wiring media. The former gives AV components the ability to network and present a virtual Java-based interface through a controller such as a television, which IP over Firewire effectively delivers the ability to create an Internet-enabled private AV network.
By using a combination of HAVi, Firewire and Airport Extreme, it would be possible for Apple to build a complete AV solutions family, including: -
A multi-tuner set-top box/DVR combo unit, capable of showing or recording upto 4 streams simultaneously: there is a market for such a device, and Sky (the Newscorp-owned satellite broadcaster for the UK) will release such a unit for SkyPlus shortly.
A 4 disk mini-RAID array, delivering 750GB of 'real' storage, or around 185 full-length movies based on DVD-quality and probably 3x/4x that figure based on satellite or analog quality.A truly genre-defining product; imagine a multi-person (Mom, Pop, 2.2 kids) where each person gets to have a personal media library (including iTMS/iTunes assets) and a personal EPG based on their viewing preferences. Imagine a Washington lobbying firm recording C-SPAN, CNN, BBC News 24 and Fox News so that the week's soundbites can be replayed and analysed ad nauseum.
A range of THX-certified DTS/Dolby EX decoder/amplifiers, for every budget/room size, with the option to link to Firewire-cabled digital speakers: Home cinema nirvana, easy cabling + a pure digital signal path until a DAC built into the speaker. Design one really clever decoder, and you could probably drive four or five separate 5.1/6.1 streams to different rooms.
And finally, either a 30" LCD for the kids, a DLP projector for the home cinema or a 50" plasma for those in between.
That's what I call an announcement.
Assuming that most people consider DVD to be sufficient quality, we should note that most DVDs never get close to exploiting the 8mb/sec theoretical maximum of the DVD-Video spec.
For the most part, most commercial titles appear to exploit around 50% of the bandwidth - i.e. 4mbits/sec - which equates to 500KB/sec.
Even with 1 megabit broadband, it's going to take 7 hours to download a movie - in other words, you'd have to decide before going to bed on Friday night what you wanted to watch on Saturday, and if you want a second movie - not unreasonble - you'd have to kick off that download just after breakfast.
So assuming that asking an audience to plan ahead rather than seek instant gratification is a viable model, you could - when megabit broadband is pervasive and cost-effective - launch an iMedia Store.
However, the key word is 'WHEN', which is not 'NOW' - so what would be the behind an Apple reinvention of the DLP projector.
This question needs a wider focus, namely would Apple consider a re-invention of the AV market - whether domestic or commercial - as a viable market and, if so, what might they set as design/functionality goals?
What if Apple chose its 20th anniversary to finally demonstrate how all of its technology works togther in a truly seamless way.
The glue to all of this is not Airport as some have said, but the rather more prosaic Firewire. 1394b (or what we call Firewire 800) has the ability to deliver the equivalent of around 20 typical DVD-quality streams (100 mbits) over standard CAT5 cabling to a distance of 100m. Using plastic optical fiber, you can send 40 streams to a distance of 50m without a repeater.
Firewire is the basis for other technologies such as the HAVi initiative, and is capable of acting as TCP/IP-capable wiring media. The former gives AV components the ability to network and present a virtual Java-based interface through a controller such as a television, which IP over Firewire effectively delivers the ability to create an Internet-enabled private AV network.
By using a combination of HAVi, Firewire and Airport Extreme, it would be possible for Apple to build a complete AV solutions family, including: -
A multi-tuner set-top box/DVR combo unit, capable of showing or recording upto 4 streams simultaneously: there is a market for such a device, and Sky (the Newscorp-owned satellite broadcaster for the UK) will release such a unit for SkyPlus shortly.
A 4 disk mini-RAID array, delivering 750GB of 'real' storage, or around 185 full-length movies based on DVD-quality and probably 3x/4x that figure based on satellite or analog quality.A truly genre-defining product; imagine a multi-person (Mom, Pop, 2.2 kids) where each person gets to have a personal media library (including iTMS/iTunes assets) and a personal EPG based on their viewing preferences. Imagine a Washington lobbying firm recording C-SPAN, CNN, BBC News 24 and Fox News so that the week's soundbites can be replayed and analysed ad nauseum.
A range of THX-certified DTS/Dolby EX decoder/amplifiers, for every budget/room size, with the option to link to Firewire-cabled digital speakers: Home cinema nirvana, easy cabling + a pure digital signal path until a DAC built into the speaker. Design one really clever decoder, and you could probably drive four or five separate 5.1/6.1 streams to different rooms.
And finally, either a 30" LCD for the kids, a DLP projector for the home cinema or a 50" plasma for those in between.
That's what I call an announcement.
Assume the 2 hours download for a 2 hour film would be reasonable: Why then not use streaming from a streaming server - the iVideo store? Say for the price you pay for lending a DVD you can view a streamed video, which can't be stored - the film industry would also be happy ... and you get instantaneous access at the time you want to see the movie.
Re: Apple Entering Projector Market?
Hey, great since Apple is big in the graphical design and entertainment field (ie: support design artists and recording artists with their professional tools). I hope they are able to bring a model to market costs $999 or less. Along with their higher end projectors.
Hey, great since Apple is big in the graphical design and entertainment field (ie: support design artists and recording artists with their professional tools). I hope they are able to bring a model to market costs $999 or less. Along with their higher end projectors.
But then you're back to the old Holy Grail of the entertainment industry, namely interactive television.
Every ITV model to date has been a failure, because the cost/stream equation just doesn't work using today's (i.e. any technology available between the mid-nineties and today) technology and bandwidth.
Far better to develop a 'fabric'-based approach to downloads - similar to Poisoned - and use a variable DRM model (48 hrs=$1.99, 5 days=$4.99, Perpetual=$14.99) to manage the consumer's usage so that you download the content (hundreds of megabytes) once, but download a DRM wrapper (hundreds of kilobytes) as many times as you need.
This means the consumer invests in the infrastructure rather than Akamai or whomever, and it also means that the consumer gets the ability to 'PVR' the content of their choice off-air.
The thing we really need to see is the next quantum shift in home network i.e. the move from megabit broadband (500kb to 1mb) to pervasive multi-megabit (>2mb) broadband within what I call the developed economies (i.e. the USA, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand plus certain Asian economies like Singapore, South Korea and the like).
However, even then, I would still favour a multi-tier distribution mechanism with infrastructure companies like Akamai partnering with local telecoms providers to create highly available, highly localised pools of 'smart' storage (several terabytes) acting as content caches in every major telephone exchange, and several hundred gigabytes available in every CLEC/PTT wiring closet.
Is your content in the closet? No, well go to the exchange and see if its there. If not, go to the full content library on the net.
Streaming would work in that situation, but that situation is the exception, not the norm. That was quoted at 800 Kbps average download rate. The norm would be more around 200 for broadband users, so the download would take 8 hours. If you did a streaming solution in this scenario, you would have to wait 6 hours for enough content to watch the movie with no interruptions or rebuffering.
So, the broadband data rates are a very limiting factor for distributing movies at decent quality/resolution levels. It may get there in a few years, but its not there today.
Another thing to note would be the cost factor. As iTunes stands today, it makes very little profit from the download business. Running a video download service would be exponentially more costly than music. With music, each persons download time for a song or album is in the seconds to minutes range. However, for a high volume movie store, you would have to sustain each individual connection for hours at a time. In the music store, each connection is opened and closed fairly quickly, eliminating most of the load on the servers. Due to the fact that movie download times are longer, the number of simultaneous connections to a given server would be far larger. This, in turn, means the bandwidth of the server needs to be much greater, as it has to serve data to more clients at a time. The solutions for these problems are not easy or cheap.
Originally posted by AndrewMT
Samsung announced its ultra-thin 56" DLP projector screen at CES. DLPs are far superior to plasma and now they can be the same size! Not to mention, DLPs are usually half the cost of plasmas. Doesn't Samsung supply Apple with most of its displays?
![Samsung_HLP5685W_300.gif]()
No lg supplys the lcd's in studio displays
on the subject of HD projectors there is no way that that is possible I was part of the staff of a HD sceminar and they had a jvc HD projector and that cost £100,000!!!! the next one up could only be run by a rack of xserves the reolution was so high but for realisticly priced projectors 1024x768 is the limit that is the reason that I will be investing in two 30" apple studio displays for my g4 cube as soon as apple announces them
LG may, in fact, supply Apple with some LCDs but so does Samsung. According to this MacWorld article (August 17, 2000), Apple invested $100 million in Samsung's LCD division. The monitor sitting in front of me (iMac 17") is, I believe, exactly the same monitor sold by Samsung.
http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/main_news.cfm?NewsID=1725
Squire
For most broadband users yes, but the original poster meant 800KiloBYTES per second, not kilobit... I have gotten up to 1.2 megabytes per second with my broadband service (cable modem).. I understand it is very rare (Cablevision/Optimum Online is one of the fastest ISPs in the country however).. At approx 1 megabyte per second, downloading a decent mpeg 4 movie *would* only take 20 minutes or so... Wild to be able to download at faster than you could get data off of a CD-ROM a few years ago
But the point remains that so few people have that much download bandwidth, that it's just not practical yet to start a service based on it...
high-definition projectors are currently on the market by several vendors. In fact, the projector I'm considering for my home theater is HDTV-ready, which is an incidental feature (i have little interest in HD). this is a $1500 projector.
paul
Are HDTV-ready projectors ones that run at 1280x1024 and rescan images, or do they actually run at 1080P?
Indeed, better color gamut than NTSC:
http://lumileds.com/solutions/LCD/lcd_index.html
Verrry interesting.
All projectors are progressive by nature. Most will convert to progressive if fed an interlaced signal--some do this better than others. Most of the consumer ones use the same deinterlacer that is found in popular progressive DVD players... and I've found this to be not nearly as good as can be achieved with a cheap PC running dScaler (open source deinterlacer). This is always limited to the resolution of the projector, however. Most projectors will accept a variety of formats but will ultimately only convert to their native resolution--and again, some do this better than others. I use the same computer (running dScaler) to also do the scaling by running it in the resolution that is native to my projector. This way, the projector only has to actually project the video which is kindof its core competence. Higher resolution projectors of the same quality tend to cost more.
Sorry, I meant to ask if it's actually 1080P native. I know they get very close. A lot of consumer flat panel TVs have this issue too....
So are you actually able to receive TV in real time, pipe it through the de-interlacer, and put it on the projector, and if so, does it work pretty well?
BTW, are you "rtype" because of cars or video games?
I'm a radiant silvergun fan myself....Yes, there are projectors that do 1080P natively so you either have to feed it a 1080P signal or let it upconvert whatever you do feed it to 1080P. I only have the Infocus X1 which does 640x480P native, which is great for standard resolution TV and DVD.Originally posted by mkrishnan
Sorry, I meant to ask if it's actually 1080P native. I know they get very close. A lot of consumer flat panel TVs have this issue too....
So are you actually able to receive TV in real time, pipe it through the de-interlacer, and put it on the projector, and if so, does it work pretty well?
BTW, are you "rtype" because of cars or video games?
And yeah, it's from the Irem game. I'm a Silvergun fan too, though--I've always loved Treasure.
As a mac user who also has a home theater
http://homepage.mac.com/alandail/Theater/PhotoAlbum32.html
it's funny seeing how how many people on the AVS forum don't understand Apple and on the Apple and how many people here don't understand home theater.
If the AVS source of this rumor is Alan Gouger, it should be a main page rumor and not a page 2 rumor. As a long time AVS reader, Alan Gouger wouldn't post the rumor unless he was confident in his sources.
And the speculation that Apple would develop a FP for the business market only is absurd. Remember, Steve Jobs is head of Pixar and Apple is the company that dominates the consumer music market with the iPod and iTunes. There's not a chance that Apple does a front projector that doesn't target home theater. Why even bother if it's just for business?
My expectation is Apple will target home theater and will bring innovation that expands the home theater market. There is a difference between watching something like Friends on a television and watching something like Star Wars or Finding Nemo at a theater. A FP brings that theater experience home.
Look at it this way, for the $2500 you get a 42" plasma screen from gateway that doesn't even do HDTV. For the same price I got a FP that gives me a 12 foot wide screen HDTV movie theater. Movies are supposed to immerse you. To get immersed, the video needs to fill your field of vision. You can't get that with a 42" plasma (or any plasma or widescreen television).
I, for one, can't wait to see what Apple comes up with.
http://homepage.mac.com/alandail/Theater/PhotoAlbum32.html
it's funny seeing how how many people on the AVS forum don't understand Apple and on the Apple and how many people here don't understand home theater.
If the AVS source of this rumor is Alan Gouger, it should be a main page rumor and not a page 2 rumor. As a long time AVS reader, Alan Gouger wouldn't post the rumor unless he was confident in his sources.
And the speculation that Apple would develop a FP for the business market only is absurd. Remember, Steve Jobs is head of Pixar and Apple is the company that dominates the consumer music market with the iPod and iTunes. There's not a chance that Apple does a front projector that doesn't target home theater. Why even bother if it's just for business?
My expectation is Apple will target home theater and will bring innovation that expands the home theater market. There is a difference between watching something like Friends on a television and watching something like Star Wars or Finding Nemo at a theater. A FP brings that theater experience home.
Look at it this way, for the $2500 you get a 42" plasma screen from gateway that doesn't even do HDTV. For the same price I got a FP that gives me a 12 foot wide screen HDTV movie theater. Movies are supposed to immerse you. To get immersed, the video needs to fill your field of vision. You can't get that with a 42" plasma (or any plasma or widescreen television).
I, for one, can't wait to see what Apple comes up with.
Home theater and business use are not mutual exclusives. The biggest growth section of the projector market is in the crossover projectors--small projectors that are small enough to be portable presentation projectors that also perform well in home theater. What would be silly would be to ignore *either* viable market.
Totally agree. DLP was huge for accomplishing both ends. This is definitely on my want list.
What about bulb life....is the projector your main TV, and are you worried about it burning out? I know this was also the question in an earlier thread about flat-panels, but I've seen a lot more burnt out projectors than FPs. On paper, it doesn't seem a big issue, but TV's get turned off and on so much more than computers....
(Oh, BTW, I hear there's a new R-Type game coming out for GBA... Mmmmm....
)
ogminlo
I would wager that DV is higher quality than what these projects usually get. DV is a broadcast quality format. Now will you get b'cast quality from a $500 consumer camera? Of course not, but use a 3-chip pro/prosumer camera and you will.
MCCFR,
There is no theoretical limit for MPEG-2 used for DVDs. The limit is 10mb/s. The rule of thumb, though, is try not to go above 8mb/s because that can cause some DVD players to choke and not display the video correctly.
Lethal
I would wager that DV is higher quality than what these projects usually get. DV is a broadcast quality format. Now will you get b'cast quality from a $500 consumer camera? Of course not, but use a 3-chip pro/prosumer camera and you will.
MCCFR,
There is no theoretical limit for MPEG-2 used for DVDs. The limit is 10mb/s. The rule of thumb, though, is try not to go above 8mb/s because that can cause some DVD players to choke and not display the video correctly.
Lethal